


The Man I Love (and The Man I Don't)

by anythingbutplatonic



Category: Arrow (TV 2012)
Genre: Episode Related, F/M, Felicity has PTSD, Missing Scene Fic, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, anti-Semitism, episode reaction fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-09
Updated: 2016-10-09
Packaged: 2018-08-20 11:33:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 669
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8247256
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anythingbutplatonic/pseuds/anythingbutplatonic
Summary: Why didn't Felicity tell Oliver she was dating? She didn't quite know herself.
Episode reaction/missing scene fic for 5x01 "Legacy".





	

She hadn’t told Oliver she was seeing someone new.

She didn’t know why she hadn’t told him. 

Felicity had tried to think about it rationally, practically. She was too busy. She just hadn’t found the right time. She kept missing the right opportunity to break the news. She wasn’t obligated to tell him anymore, because they weren’t the same people they once were.

It was none of his business to know.

She didn’t want to upset him.

She didn’t want to unbalance the equilibrium they had established in the long months since John and Thea had left, and Laurel died. 

She didn’t think she could stand to see the look on his face if she told him she was dating again, back on the market. 

It was like...Schrodinger’s dating. Felicity was afraid of telling Oliver she’d met someone because she feared his reaction, but if she didn’t tell him she wouldn’t get the opportunity to _see_ him react. 

Three months. That’s how long it had been since she’d bumped into Detective Malone at the store and got chatting to him. She’d welcomed him to the area, as he was new to Star City. He had a nice laugh, and he was nice to look at, with the spiky, swept-up hair and dark eyes, and had piqued Felicity’s intrigue, given his penchant for Fruit Loops despite being thirty-three. 

So they’d gone for coffee. And then another. Then they’d gone to dinner. Then they’d gone to a movie and went back to his apartment afterwards. He’d kissed her as she’d climbed into the taxi on her way home after several glasses of wine and a game of footsie on the sofa. 

And she hadn’t told Oliver. Not a word, or even an inkling, that she had a new ‘special someone’ in her life, someone she really liked and liked spending time with. 

Which, given her usual penchant for talking too much, was highly unusual for her. 

If Oliver had picked up on her hiding something, he hadn’t mentioned it. He was too chivalrous for that, too noble. He wouldn’t pry if he thought she didn’t want him to ask. 

 But _did_  she? Want him to ask? 

For weeks, she had had nightmares, of Havenrock and Laurel and Cooper and nuclear missiles destroying hundreds of thousands of people in an instant. She was torn between begging Oliver for some kind of support and never wanting him to see how much she was made vulnerable by the turmoil of the last year. 

In the beginning, she’d wanted to feel his arms around her and his lips in her hair whispering loving affirmations as her heart rate slowed down again. She’d wanted to ask him how he got to sleep at night when he had bad dreams. She wanted him to hold her hand until she felt calm enough to put her head back onto the pillow. 

But when she’d realized she could no longer ask for any of those things, she’d pushed it away, forced it down somewhere in the back of her mind where she couldn’t see or feel it. 

And now here she was, slumped on the sofa while a cute guy that she liked and who seemed not to care that she was Jewish (a surprising dealbreaker for some gross guys in college, it turned out) or a tech geek or couldn’t function without at least two cups of coffee in the morning, massaged her shoulders with nimble fingers and brought her a glass of red wine. 

Maybe she _could_  stop loving Oliver. Maybe she _could_  be completely happy with Detective Malone. Maybe she _could_ come to love him instead of the first person she thought of at night when she woke screaming with the death toll of Havenrock emblazoned on the insides of her eyelids, and the _whoosh_  of a nuclear missile in her ears. 

Maybe. Or maybe not.

Or maybe it was better to leave Schrodinger’s box unopened and exist in relative ignorance for a while longer. 


End file.
